________________________________________________
The Keystone Hotel was in full blast when the doctor and Alves returned
from Wisconsin. Miss M'Gann met them and introduced them to the large,
parlor-floor room she had engaged for them. The newcomers joined the
household that was taking the air on the stone steps of the hotel. The step
below Miss M'Gann's was held by a young man who seemed to share with Miss
M'Gann the social leadership of the Keystone. He was with the Baking Powder
Trust, he told Sommers. He was tall and fair, with reddish hair that massed
itself above his forehead in a shiny curl, and was supplemented by a waving
auburn mustache. His scrupulous dress, in the fashion of the foppish clerk,
gave an air of distinction to the circle on the steps. Most of this circle
were so average as scarcely to make an impression at first sight,--a few
young women who earned their livelihood in business offices, a few decayed,
middle-aged bachelors, a group of widows whose incomes fitted the rates of
the Keystone, and several families that had given up the struggle with
maids-of-all-work. One of these latter,--father, mother, and daughter--had
seats at table with Sommers and Alves. The father, a little, bald-headed
man with the air of a furtive mouse, had nothing to say; the mother was a
faded blond woman, who shopped every day with the daughter; the daughter,
who was sixteen, had the figure of a woman of twenty, and the assurance
born in hotels and boarding-houses. Her puffy rounded face, set in a thick
roll of blond hair, had the expression of a precocious doll. When she had
sounded Alves on the subject of silk waists, she relapsed into silence and
stared amiably at the doctor.
Sommers arranged to hang his little celluloid sign, _Howard Sommers, M.
D., Physician and Surgeon_, beneath his window. The proprietor of the
Keystone thought it gave a desirable, professional air to the house. But
Webber, the young man in the Baking Powder Trust, was sceptical of its
commercial value to the doctor. Certainly the results from its appearance
were not ascertainable. Sommers had no patients. The region about the
Keystone was a part of the World's Fair territory, and had been greatly
overbuilt. It had shrunk in these stagnant months to one-tenth of its
possible population. There was, besides, an army of doctors, at least one
for every five families Sommers judged from the signs. They were for the
most part graduates of little, unknown medical schools or of drug stores.
Lindsay had once said that this quarter of the city was a nest of
charlatans. The two or three physicians of the regular school had private
hospitals, sanitariums, or other means of improving their business. Many of
the doctors used the drug stores as offices and places of rendezvous. Their
signs hung, one below another, from a long crane at the entrances of the
stores. It was an impartial, hospitable method of advertising one's
services. There was one such bulletin at the shop on the corner of the
neighboring avenue; the names were unfamiliar and foreign,--Jelly, Zarnshi,
Pasko, Lemenueville. Sommers suspected that their owners had taken to
themselves _noms de guerre_.
At first Sommers avoided these places, and got the few drugs he needed at a
well-known pharmacy in the city. He had an idea that matters would improve
when people returned from the country or the seashore. But these people did
not take long vacations. He had had but one case, the wife of a Swedish
janitor in a flat-building, and he had reason to believe that his services
had not pleased. Every morning, as Alves hurried to reach the Everglade
School, his self-reproach increased. He hated to think that she was in the
same treadmill in which he had found her. His failure was a matter of
pride, also; he began to suspect that the people in the house talked about
it. When Webber spoke to him of Dr. Jelly's success, he felt that the
Keystone people had been making comparisons. They were walking to the
railroad station after breakfast--the clerk on his way south to the baking
powder works; he, for a daily paper. The young clerk nodded to a
black-whiskered, sallow man, and said:
"He's Doc. Jelly, and has the biggest practice around here. He's thick with
the drug-store people,--has an interest in it, I have heard. I haven't seen
your sign over there. Why don't you hang it out?"
Sommers did not like to say that it was in bad professional form. After he
had left the friendly clerk, however, he walked over to the drug store and
made some inquiries in a general way. The place was a shameful pretence of
a prescription pharmacy. Cigars, toilet articles, and an immense soda-water
fountain took up three-fourths of the floor space. A few dusty bottles were
ranged on some varnished oak shelves; there was also a little closet at one
side, where the blotchy-faced young clerk retired to compound
prescriptions. The clerk hailed him affably, calling him by his name. He
seemed to know that Sommers used up-town pharmacies and had no practice;
and he, too, good-naturedly offered his advice.
"Goin' to settle in the neighborhood? Shall be glad to have your slab to
add to the collection." He pointed jocularly to the filigree-work of signs
that were pendent above the door.
"Well, I am not settled yet," Sommers replied, as easily as he could.
"Mostly homeopaths hereabouts," the clerk went on, rolling out a handful of
cigars for a purchaser to make his selection. "Makes no difference, I say;
any one with a diploma is welcome to hang out and try his chances with the
rest. But all these"--he waved the hand which held the cigars at the
signs--"are fine men. They do a rushin' business."
Sommers left the shop; he was not quite ready to do a "rushin' business"
and to advertise for it from the corner drug store. As he retreated the
clerk looked at him with a cynical smile. In the clerk's vernacular, he
wasn't "in the push," not "the popular choice."
These days Sommers had so little to do that he could meet Alves at the
close of the afternoon session. At first he had gone to the Everglade
School and waited while the pupils bustled out. He disliked seeing her in
the performance of her petty duties, giving commands and reproofs. The
principal and the teachers stared at them when they walked away from the
school, and he gathered that his appearance there was embarrassing to
Alves. So they came to have a rendezvous at the rear of a vacant lot not
far from the deserted cottage, which lifted its ill-favored roof above the
scrub oaks. Then they would traverse the familiar walks in and out of the
deserted streets.
When he told her of his conversation with Webber and the drug clerk's
remarks, she counselled unexpectedly:
"Why don't you do it? Miss M'Gann says they all do it in Chicago,--that is,
the doctors who aren't swells."
He smiled sadly at the idea that his holding aloof from this advertising
custom might be set down to his ambition of being a "swell doctor." The
method, however, seemed entirely proper to Alves, who hadn't the
professional prejudices, and whose experience with the world had taught her
to make the fight in any possible way, in any vulgar way that custom had
pointed out.
"Well, if you want me to," he conceded drearily.
"It isn't a great matter," she replied. "I don't _want_ you to do
anything that you don't feel like doing. Only," she sighed, "there's so
much opposition to married women's teaching, and we must live somehow."
"I'll do it to-morrow," Sommers replied quickly, stung by the unintentional
implication of the speech.
They walked to their favorite haunt on the lake shore, beneath the
crumbling walls of the little convent. During these hot September days this
spot had become the brightest place in their lives. They had come there to
find themselves, to avoid the world. They had talked and planned, had been
silent, had loved, and had rested. Today they watched the fiery sun sinking
in its bed of shining dust, and did not speak. Alves was unusually weary,
and he was sad over the decision he had just made, weakly, it seemed to
him. A good deal of the importance of his revolt against commercial
medicine disappeared. Lindsay tried oily, obsequious means of attracting
attention. He was to hang his sign from a corner store. Some dim idea of
the terrible spectre that haunts the days and nights of those without
capital or position confronted him. If he had never been rich, he had
always the means to give him time to look about, to select from a number of
opportunities. If he could manage to wait, even six months, some hospital
place might turn up. His old associates at Philadelphia would have him in
mind. He did not dare to write them of his necessity; even his friends
would be suspicious of his failure to gain a foothold in this hospitable,
liberal metropolis.
He rose at last to escape these gloomy thoughts. Alves followed him without
a word. He did not offer her his arm, as he was wont to do when they walked
out here beyond the paths where people came. She respected his mood, and
falling a step behind, followed the winding road that led around the ruined
Court of Honor to the esplanade. As they gained the road by a little
footpath in the sandy bank, a victoria approached them. The young woman who
occupied it glanced hastily at Sommers and half bowed, but he had turned
back to give Alves his hand. The carriage drove on past them, then stopped.
"That lady wishes to speak to you," Alves said.
"I think not," Sommers replied quickly, turning in the opposite direction.
As they walked away the carriage started, and when Alves looked around it
had already passed over the rough wooden bridge that crossed the lagoon.
"Was it some one you knew?" she asked indifferently.
"It was Miss Hitchcock," Sommers replied shortly. He told her something
about the Hitchcocks. "She was the first woman I knew in Chicago," he
concluded musingly. Alves looked at him with troubled eyes, and then was
silent. Territories unknown in her experience were beginning to reveal
themselves in the world of this man.
Read next: PART II#CHAPTER III
Read previous: PART II#CHAPTER I
Table of content of Web of Life
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your reviewYour review will be placed after the table of content of this book
